Britain’s green energy disaster should be an awful warning to Americans
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
This is an excellent summary:
Last year, the Biden administration set an ambitious new goal for the USA: to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by the year 2030, increasing US offshore capacity more than seven hundred times over. The UK already has 15 GW of offshore wind, more than 300 times as much as the USA: and our experience should be a terrible warning to Americans.
The UK’s electricity prices are the highest since records began in 1920 and are now amongst the highest in all Europe. One reason for this is obvious: slightly less than half our electricity comes from gas-burning Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGTs) and gas now costs £90 per megawatt-hour (MWh), nearly five times higher than normal. CCGTs are cheap to build (around £650m per GW) and operate. In normal times they would generate electricity at a total cost of £40 per MWh. That’s now risen to nearly £150/MWh, thanks to Vladimir Putin and his impact on the gas market.
But that’s not the whole story. The other reason why British electricity is so expensive is because we have so much wind power: particularly, so much offshore wind power. Bad though the current situation is, we would be an even worse state if we had built even more offshore wind, as the British government plans to.
As an example, the offshore wind farms Hornsea Two and Moray East were completed in 2022 with capital costs of £2.77 billion per GW and £2.75bn/GW, more than four times the cost of CCGT capacity. They’re expensive to maintain, which is not surprising since offshore windfarms have all their many generators mounted at the top of 200-metre tall masts far away from land. Estimates of maintenance costs are as high as £200m per GW installed, per annum. The nominal cost of offshore wind generation is £170/MWh – noticeably higher than that for CCGTs, even in these dire times of high gas prices.
The other factor to bear in mind is that not only is wind capacity extremely expensive to build, wind farms do not deliver anything like their rated capacity over time. This is bad news for the customer, because the higher the capacity factor – that is, the higher the percentage of the rated capacity the powerplant actually delivers over time – the cheaper the energy. In 2022 the UK’s onshore and offshore windfarms operated with a capacity factor of 33 per cent. In 2021 it was only 29 per cent.
It gets worse. Like most other renewable generation technologies, wind power is unpredictably intermittent and highly variable. Also, since wind turbines are not synchronously connected to the grid, they provide no “grid inertia” – more on that shortly. Wind turbines cannot be asked to deliver energy when it is required, and their output changes rapidly. These failings must be mitigated and costed, and users have to pay for these costs on top of the price of the electricity.
In 2021 the UK annual grid balancing costs reached £4.19 billion, £150 per household. For context, back in 1995 when we didn’t have much wind power the balancing cost for the grid was a mere £250 million per annum. A large, and growing, contribution to these costs is constraint management, as when a wind farm producing electricity which isn’t wanted – perhaps when it is windy in the middle of the night – is paid not to put that electricity into the grid.
The problems and costs don’t stop there. Our transmission grid system was originally designed to link generation centres close to sources of fuel (coal, gas) and load centres such as cities. Now our generation sites are moving further away from load centres. Our grid transmission system has to be expanded to connect the new renewable generators, which is bad enough when they are on a remote hilltop and worse still when they are out at sea. The National Grid estimates that on current plans this work will cost £46 billion – £1,533 per household – to 2030.
Then there’s grid inertia. The British grid is termed an island grid, which means that we are solely responsible for controlling the grid frequency between tight limits so that things plugged into the grid will work as expected. Frequency control becomes easier as the inertia of the grid system increases. Grid system inertia is a key measure of how resilient the system is in response to transient changes. Inertia is the sum of the energy stored within the rotating mass of the machines (generators and motors) connected directly to the system. Low system inertia increases the risk of rapid system changes, which may then lead to disconnection of load or generation and then system instability. Apart from tree-burning biomass stations and hydro generation, renewables plants bring no inertia to the grid: as the proportion of renewables rises, system inertia falls and the risk of major problems such as blackouts increases.
We have attempted to reduce the issue of intermittency by expanding our connections to the European electricity grid – the hope being that the wind will be blowing somewhere else even if it is not blowing here – but we’re still exposed to periods when wind generation across the whole of Europe falls near to nothing. And these connections do not help with inertia and stability either because few of the connections to the continent are synchronous connections.
In 1995 the problem of grid frequency stability required provision of rapidly responding generators capable of changing their combined output at a rate of 0.13 GW per second in order to deal with fluctuations. With the arrival of so much unpredictable wind power, that figure has now increased almost tenfold to 1.15 GW per second!
Extra services like very rapid response gas generators, required in order to make it possible to connect renewables to the grid, add between £30/MWh and £50/MWh to renewables’ cost. Thus the true cost to the customer of offshore wind generators is actually between £200/MWh and £220/MWh, much more than CCGTs even in these times of ruinously high gas prices.
Phasing out CCGT production will therefore increase domestic electricity prices painfully.
But it seems that CCGTs will be phased out much sooner than planned. The government has proposed an expansion to 60 GW of offshore wind by 2030 (capital expenditure £122 billion) and solar to 70 GW by 2035 (capital expenditure to 2030 £30 billion).
This is extremely unwise: we still have no way of storing electricity at scale and the planned transitions of home heating and transport to electrical power are progressing weakly and may yet stall completely. Creating such a large solar generation fleet raises the nightmare scenario of early summer mornings, with little demand and the vast majority of generation being solar with zero inertia: massive grid collapses would be all but a certainty. Vast amounts of energy will be generated only to be expensively constrained off and probably wasted, and the scenario of unmet demand – with attendant blackouts – will become unavoidable.
The UK grid is simply not able to cope with the proposed amounts of renewables.
And we simply cannot afford all this. If we add the costs of an even more extended National Grid, this programme of wind and solar generation expansion will cost £232 billion – more than £8,000 per household this decade – all to be paid for by the suffering energy user. It should be emphasised that these figures do not include the costs of the huge energy storage industry which will also be necessary, whatever that may turn out to be: hydrogen or ammonia or something even more dangerous and expensive. Heat pumps and switching to electric vehicles could lift total costs above £1 trillion.
Truly, Americans should look at the British renewables disaster and give thanks that today they have hardly any offshore wind. And they might, looking at the UK, recoil with horror from the plans of the Biden administration: especially as most US offshore wind will need to be floating offshore wind rather than built on the seabed, and so even more expensive.
If either nation would like to reduce carbon emissions and/or reduce its dependence on fossil fuels supplied by unsavoury overseas regimes, an immediate measure would be to build new, modern, high efficiency CCGT plant which would immediately cut the need for gas and reduce emissions without requiring vast, expensive alterations to the grid and special measures so that they don’t cause it to collapse. We should also begin building new nuclear plant with some genuine urgency, as that is the only genuine, affordable, practical way to seriously cut emissions and achieve secure energy supplies.
Dr Capell Aris PhD has spent his career in the electricity generation sector. He is a former Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/11/green-energy-disaster-uk-awful-warning-america/
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Excellent article, just why are OFGEM and National Grid going along with all the green crap, when they know that it is not going to work?
because its govt policy and they have to respond to that. The problem is no political party will really say it as it is either now and all feel the need to attract the green vote. Unfortunately until people really start to experience grid blackouts fuel rationing etc your not going to change the mindset. Fortunately we are still a country of NIMBYs and they at least slow down the process.
The Americans won’t listen to this good advice. They have done well out of provoking hatreds between Slavic groups and keeping an avoidable war going while the supply of cheap Siberian gas to Europe is prevented and high CO2 liquefied US gas is substituted at high prices.
Sadly, even burning all available ´fossil’ fuels will not raise CO2 to the desirable 1000ppm that plants prefer.
Our beloved leaders are insane and the Chinese are laughing at the stupid round eyes.
Dr Aris or a here today gone tomorrow Secretary of State for Energy ……no contest.
Knowledgeable person versus and ignorant moron.
Excellent summary.
However, and this is a none partisan, political comment, I had problems getting past the first para. It was the EU/UK decision to cut off supplies of LNG from Russia not the other way round. I really do object to the mindless repeating of this ‘Orwellian’ double speak. The two benefactors of this decision, US and Norway are joining the Chinese laughing all the way to the bank.
well pointed out
Russian gas is being transmitted to China where it is liquefied for shipping by sea to customers in the West at much higher prices
No, that is not happening with gas. China issued an edict requiring that its gas entitlements should not be sold to Europe. They have been going via Suez and Singapore because the Arctic route has been tricky with ice this year. Previously Chinese vessels were happily discharging in Europe without going via China.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/china-gas-lng-halt-sales-europe-energy-crisis-winter-supply-2022-10?op=1
The UK stopped its small Russian LNG imports in March 2023. They have continued into the EU. In fact today there are 2 Russian cargoes discharging simultaneously at Zeebrugge, Belgium with another 2 just offshore at anchor. Spain is a major destination, but supply also continues to France, Netherlands and Portugal. The EU is only starting discussion about halting this trade. All the reductions in pipeline volumes have been the result of Russian decisions to cut supply. Remarkably, there is still supply across the Ukraine on EUstream.
Of course the UK stopped Russian imports in March 2022.
Russia stopped NS1 on 2 September 2022, claiming that EU sanctions had caused technical problems preventing supply of the full volume of gas through the pipeline. Siemens Energy, which maintained the turbine, stated there were no legal obstacles to its maintaining the pipeline.
NS2 never started because Germany suspended certification on 22 February 2022 because of Russia’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics and the deployment of troops in territory held by the DPR and LPR.
NS1 A and B and NS2 A were blown up on 26 September 2022. NS2 B remains intact.
Wind Power Reassessed: A review of the UK wind resource for electricity generation. Dr Capell Aris, July 2017
Click to access Aris-Wind-paper.pdf
Capell has made a number of valuable contributions over the years, several of which have been published by GWPF. He and I had a go at disentangling what really happened during the August 2019 blackout before the official report was assembled: we got fairly close to the truth – and certainly much more accurate than the misleading press reporting. Some of his contributions:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/04/Aris2018.pdf Battery wastage
Click to access Capell-Aris-UK-Electricity-System.pdf
Gas prices now about £21/MWh I believe. Doesn’t detract from the rest of the article of course. The inevitable outcome must be obvious to Sunak and perhaps even Starmer.
Click to access EUROPE%20GAS%20INVENTORIES%20(JUNE%202023).pdf
double that in the winter 23 forward mkt but still way below windy millers costs.
Hurricanes will prevent southern offshore wind. A hurricane is to be expected every few years from South Padre to Manteo.
Environmentalists will prevent northern offshore wind.
‘the Biden administration set an ambitious new goal for the USA: to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by the year 2030’
The Biden administration will be swept out of office well before 2030. Setting long term goals is posturing.
I thought grid balancing costs hit a record £2bn last year – doubled from 2021 – but here the cost for 2021 is said to be £4.19bn. No wonder the standing charge is going up yet again from 1 July.
How many politicians will read this and understand it? Answer: very few and even fewer. We are doomed!
All the complex technical issues related to climate change need not be considered provided the indisputable fact that climate change is not and cannot be affected by the infinitesimal amount of carbon dioxide created by man is accepted. Enough reputable academics confirm this. MSM has much to answer for. Carbon Dioxide is a good gas and essential to life.
Essentially all of the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere since the beginning of the 20th Century have been produced by mankind. Over the same period, however, there has been no increases in the frequency, intensity nor duration of extreme weather across the globe. CO2 production is not a significant problem.
Come Come! All that plant food in the atmosphere is causing a global catastrophe with weeds proliferating all over the place. Farmers, whose only sin is to burn down the jungle and deprive a few lefties of a place to do their PhD, are now suffering, because the jungle is growing back faster than ever. How can you say there has been no problems … if this continues at the current rate of growth, the entire globe will be covered in Amazon forest within a few decades.
And, speaking personally … I’m certain rising CO2 is causing me to have to cut the grass more often!
Because OFGEM is run by a Green zealot and National Grid will double their turnover and profits putting all the expensive grid in.
OFGEM isn’t run by green zealots and actually its overtly bureaucratic systems helps delay for years investment decisions
When obvious true statements must be repeated again and again with the result that nothing changes, you must agree that they are being ignored for a specific purpose. All of the salient points made in the above article have been made continuously since at least 2010, by multiple credible, educated and experienced people. So what then is the purpose of the attempted destruction of the current energy systems in multiple countries around the world. And why are professionals in the affected fields keeping their mouths shut? To save their jobs? Who needs a job when you are living in the cold and dark watching your dwindling supply of food disappear? I just don’t understand.
It’s called go along to get along. Place bets on when it all goes pear-shaped.
It’s already gone pear shaped. But they just don’t mention it.
The problem with this article is it makes no mention of the strike prices. Which recently have been about £37 per MWh.
Yes you will say we are not paying that price currently, but the fact is we are promised that for the future.
There are no promises of £37 for the future. That price is purely optional, and in any case is in 2012 money, worth about £50/ MWh currently. Your attempt to repeat the Harrabin deception does not wash. Moreover, we are going to be paying £200/MWh for all the existing wind (escalating with inflation) for many years to come.
kzbkzb :
Firstly the strike prices are not enforcible and hence the prices in these “contracts” are absolutely meaningless as well as “promised for the future”.
Secondly, as the article points out these prices do not include the costs to provide grid stability and reliable power. The “strike prices” are only for unreliable, intermittent power and with no added costs to upgrade the grid, provide grid stability and energy storage.
These costs make renewables far more expensive than fossil fuels and nuclear. Wind turbines use 1000 times more cocrete and steel per unit of power than nuclear and 2000 times more than a CCGT plant.
So low is the EROI of renewables that it is impossible to run a modern economy, and with such large populations, on renewables, which demonstrates the purpose of Net Zero.
In fact the proof that there is no climte emergency as a result of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 is demonstrated by the attempt to transition from fossil fuels to renewables completely ignoring nuclear fission, the only affordable, abundant, reliable low CO2 emission power that exists.
Yep.
Well I agree about nuclear fission but we closed down the fuel cycle and there is no chance of building sufficient capacity fast enough now. They’ve left it too late.
“but the fact is we are promised that for the future.”
And you actually believe that, really and truly?
Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but never jam today.
kzbkzb is a troll.
I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
I’m not a troll I’m trying to help you. The other side will say the prices of wind and (particularly) solar are falling fast. Solar panels are cheaper than the same area of plywood. Prices of 2 cents/kWh are being quoted.
This is the reply this article will get from the other side. You have to address arguments like that.
But you know that wind and solar prices are not falling fast. You know that index linked ROCs and Feed-in tariffs continue to be paid, and that the average wind CFD has continued to rise in price.
“Solar panels are cheaper than the same area of plywood.”
Really…
“A standard 250W solar panel in 2023 costs £400-£500, but can vary depending on the type and size of the whole system. One of the most common domestic sizes is a 4kW solar panel system, which costs around £6,400 and will cover around 29 square metres of your roof.”
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2014/08/what-is-the-installation-cost-for-solar-panels
That looks like ~£220 per square meter to me.
Wickes sell non-structural hardwood plywood for £8.05 per m2.
https://www.wickes.co.uk/Products/Building-Materials/Sheet-Materials/Plywood/c/1000191
So solar panels are 27.5 times dearer…
Give it up, you’re embarrassing yourself!
Catweazle666, firstly I am not embarrassing myself because it was not me that made that claim about the price of solar panels. I am reporting what the other side say.
Here is one site which comes pretty close to what I was saying. The claim that solar panels are as cheap as plywood is something I have seen repeated several times on “green” websites.
https://davidsuzuki.org/story/canadian-solar-inventor-says-solar-panels-almost-cheaper-than-plywood/
Thank you kzbkzb.
Tell me, are you in the market for a nice bridge?
I have a fine selection to suit every pocket, all guaranteed good condition, never raced or rallied.
Finally, a voice of reason. The majority of green energy supporters have no idea of the complexities of connecting the magic windmills and solar to the existing grid. Perhaps if they taught the physics of energy production rather than CRT and pronouns in schools people would understand. Solar, which is DC, requires electronics to change it to AC which introduce large amounts of harmonics and hash–and zero output at night. Wind is both intermittent and unreliable. To further complicate the issue neither wind or solar have spinning inertia as described herein. Oh, those pesky laws of physics again. What is needed is more magic unicorns.
You have heard then, ‘those pesky laws of physics’ are only your opinion, and are equal to anyone else’s, who’s just an anyone! 🙂
“I choose truth over facts.” The great intellect and philosopher AOC.
They would say that the laws of physics were all created by white men … so they have to be wrong.
If you scrutinize a GCSE exam paper titled ‘Physics – Electricity’, you will see just why there is no understanding of the subject but merely appreciation of spurious green arguments.
The obsession with “green energy” is a disaster for all countries pursuing such. It is not only the UK
“Britain’s green energy disaster should be an awful warning to Americans”
Britain’s green energy disaster should be an awful warning to anyone living in Britain.
The whole point of Science, and Engineering, is to analyse what has been done and ‘build back better’ the next time, to reuse an in vogue phrase, as it is meant to be understood.
However, our Arts and Humanities graduates, so much to the fore with promoting the Climate Emergency mantra and NET Zero policies, continue to treat History as ‘that’s the (only) way to do it’. 🙂
“an immediate measure would be to build new, modern, high efficiency CCGT plant”
No. This is bad for fuel diversity, and only worsens the present over-dependency on gas as a primary energy source.
A better answer would be a fleet of new coal fired power stations, located at ports to access the huge global coal market. But nobody is willing stand up to challenge the emotive assertion that coal is “dirty”.
“We should also begin building new nuclear plant with some genuine urgency, as that is the only genuine, affordable, practical way to seriously cut emissions and achieve secure energy supplies.”
A view of the future through rose-coloured goggles.
It will take 20 years for nuclear to make any contribution, even if we turn a blind eye to the development/performance risks of a fleet of unproven new designs. There should be lessons here in the experience of the French EPR.
The claim that nuclear is affordable needs to explain why the private sector will not accept the risks and liabilities. Any significant nuclear contribution to energy supply needs public sector underwriting of risks and liabilities. Not a great starting point to build a value-for-money argument.
“The claim that nuclear is affordable needs to explain why the private sector will not accept the risks and liabilities.”
Government. The problem is NOT the private sector. The problem is government. Over regulation and capricious actions. The private sector KNOWS it CANNOT trust government.
See: Shoreham Nuclear.
Quite. High cost is about absurd regulation that is designed to try to prevent new nuclear. We could perfectly well build much lower cost designs with a proven safety and performance record.
BWTM
Steve Milloy at junkscience.com has a few articles concerning the dangers of nuclear radiation: government has fabricated the belief in extreme danger. It’s a lie. It’s not near as dangerous as government makes out.
The history of the lie goes back to the 1950s, and the invention of the LNT standard.
WHY they lied isn’t clear yet. It’s beginnings are so long ago, we may never find out; the principals are all dead.
Here you go Gamecock!
The specious statistical sophistry known as “Linear No Threshold theory”, beloved of dodgy regulators the /World over!
https://junkscience.com/2023/06/emails-reveal-radiation-safety-establishment-tries-to-censor-blockbuster-debunking-of-the-lnt-and-cleanse-the-health-physics-society-of-lnt-critics/
I didn’t know there was a “health physics society.”
They should have an annual award named after . . . Gamecock’s mother. She was the first female health physics tech. She applied for the job, and was told the job was for men only. She said, “I’ll sue.”
She was the first female ever to go into a nuclear reactor.
Anecdotally, and somewhat related to this topic, she was pulled off the job 3 times due to over exposure to radiation on her dosimeter badge. She lived to 4 months short of 100.
Excellent point. A similar condition exists in the U.S. right now, as Barrator Biden has released additional leases to oil and gas companies, fully knowing his EPA will obfuscate, stall and effective squash any new development with the application of their onerous regulations.
“No. This is bad for fuel diversity, and only worsens the present over-dependency on gas as a primary energy source.”
What about the decades – centuries perhaps – of shale gas readily available?
That’ll keep us going until we get large scale nuclear up and running.
Catweazle. There are still important questions about single point of failure risk. This could be technical risk in dependence on common infrastructure and technology, and it can be economic risks associated with focus on relatively narrow market segment.
We hear complaint about domestic production not changing the wider price of gas. There is a fair point lurking about in this – single commodity comes with the opportunity cost of consume something expensive when price spikes up. As the complainers say, domestic production does not change the wider price of gas (doesn’t reduce bills in a market based system).
If we want to keep UK energy supply reliable/secure and cost competitive across a range of scenarios, we have to align with the whole energy market. Focus on a segment of the market will always fall short.
To Gamecock and IDAU – it’s not about Government or regulation, it’s about private sector unwillingness and inability to bear the true costs and risks of civil nuclear activity.
Development and start-up is notoriously risky, creating a large risk of abandonment before start-up. There is no private sector mechanism to reliably manage nuclear liabilities for the thousands of years involved. And there is the army of specialists needed to operate a nuclear business, which means nuclear has massive fixed costs and can only exist in industrial behemoths operating many nuclear plants.
The UK Government spent 20 years trying to get the banks (the international capital markets) interested in UK nuclear new build. It lined-up a number of favourable UK sites to tempt them in. It offered a couple of huge cushions in the form of a 35 year price guarantee and a defined “transfer price” to take the spent nuclear waste into the public sector.
The last 20 years taught the Government an important lesson: nuclear is uninvestable to the private sector limited liability companies. The two are incompatible. The best we can hope to do is some measure of private services where the private sector share of liabilities can be estimated and limited by “socialising” them back to the public. When the public purse is underwriting the liabilities (those the private sector refuses or cannot accept), the business is fundamentally a public sector business (like the armed forces and nuclear deterrent for that matter).
The UK Government is setting up GBN and it now has Andrew Bowie as Minister for Nuclear. That’s about as much private sector as you can expect. To repeat my point above – you cannot get much of an affordability case off the ground for nuclear energy when it displaces activities which can and will be carried out in the private sector – such as gas and coal fired power generation.
That may well be the case Jordan, but even if we have substantial nuclear base load we’re still going to need gas for dispatchable gas turbine generation, it makes far more sense to use our own than to buy it overseas involving liquefaction, transportation and re-vapourisation, all of which are energy intensive and at least double the cost and vulnerability to all sorts of external factors.
Then there are matters of feedstock for assorted industries such as plastics, fertiliser and of course domestic heating.
And if we are extracting it from our own reservoirs, that largely nullifies the single point of failure problem, we will certainly have a number of sites functioning, and of course we can sell it ourselves.
As to being tied to the market, that doesn’t seem to be the case for the USA, whose domestic price is around a fifth of ours.
Every time I hear the canard about domestic gas production not affecting the price of gas it is followed by a denial of the fact that in summer we are normally about self sufficient and prices are low. In winter, we pay a premium to import. The number of months where we need to pay that premium can be reduced – even to nil if we produce enough – by producing more ourselves. It’s all there in the history. The claim is bunk.
“it’s not about Government or regulation”
Wrong. Nuke plants cost 20X what they should, due to government regulation.
“it’s about private sector unwillingness and inability to bear the true costs and risks of civil nuclear activity.”
A government fabrication.
I get what you are saying Catweazle, but all those fair points are better addressed by having a better fuel mix. A good mix of coal and gas as primary fuels will always be better than gas on points of economics and risk.
Gamecock – nuke plants could be FREE and it doesn’t change the private sector’s reluctance to take nuclear risks. Your reluctance to accept learning points from the last 20 years shows that the UK Government is far smarter than you.
Here’s another little fact for you: the private insurance market will NOT underwrite nuclear liabilities. It’s standard practice. So when the banks (international capital markets) look at nuclear investment, they see a risk which cannot be mitigated through the market. That gets them turning away from the get go, so the Government needs to step in and “socialise” the risk. Why do you think the US has the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act.
And then think about nuclear liabilities which need to be managed for tens of thousands of years, many human generations after the death of the original “investors”. What kind of private provision for management of these liabilities is realistic? A lot happens to human societies over the space of a couple of centuries, so there is very little we can rely upon as assumptions for the performance of private management of liabilities for millennia when the profit motive is all in the first few years. The ancient Egyptian kings tried to bury their treasures for eternity, and their efforts were thwarted after only a few centuries. Again, you are showing the UK Government is a lot smarter than you when they “socialise” the issue with the nuclear waste transfer pricing arrangements.
To repeat my conclusion, if the Government of the US and UK Government have to step in to “socialise” the costs of something which is perfectly capable of being delivered in the private sector (coal and gas), your affordability argument cannot get off the ground.
“A good mix of coal and gas as primary fuels will always be better than gas on points of economics and risk.”
Agreed, but for a number of reasons coal mining in this country is not going to happen.
In situ gasification however…
catweazle. We’ve been here before. I mention power station location near port facilities to access the international market (see my first comment). I definitely don’t believe we should depend on UK coal resources. If some domestic sources can supply internationally competitive supplies, all well and good. As per the last time, I don’t want my point to be steered down some misunderstanding about the competitiveness of UK coal.
IDAU: ” In winter, we pay a premium to import. The number of months where we need to pay that premium can be reduced … by producing more ourselves.”
It’s a simple opportunity cost argument: if there is a premium in the winter in the wider NWE market, there is will be premium in the opportunity cost of consumption of domestically produced gas.
The people who run this “makes no difference” argument do have some merit on those grounds (less so on other grounds like balance of payments and tax, but that’s not what we are discussing here). If the UK improves primary fuel diversity, it will bring advantages, since arbitrage can help to mitigate fuel premiums as and when they occur.
“the UK Government is far smarter than you”
[citation needed]
🙂
“Again, you are showing the UK Government is a lot smarter than you”
I really and truly laughed out loud at that!
Surely you can’t dispute that extracting our own gas and oil is economically preferable to importing it at considerable expense and risk from other countries?
Are you unaware of the economic benefits from North Sea oil and gas to this country for decades?
I’m pleased to have given you a laugh catweazle 🙂
On the question of whether they have learned from the experience last 20 years, the UK Government has given up on private investors and is now creating a new state-owned entity, GBN. It seems that some people cannot accept that lesson and prefer to pretend that nuclear power is cost effective (“affordable”), regardless of whether it is investable. When making a choice between the two, I have to say the UK Government appears to be the smarter.
Britain needs diversity of supply. If nuclear power is not investable to the private sector, we should be wary of your scenario of nuclear+gas. You still have single point of failure risk as balancing is over-dependent on physical supply of gas (and the economic risk of the price).
An alternative (if the Government would get out the way) is a new fleet of coal fired power stations. Even if there is a nuclear component (leaving aside whether it is investable and affordable), balancing would be diversified across two primary energy types. I could go further and suggest a place for some oil-fired generating capacity.
On the question of the UKCS, if we follow your philosophy, we’d still be making the Triumph Herald. Extracting our own gas and oil is economically preferable if the UKCS is cost-competitive in global markets.
So you object to the use of shale oil and gas due to “single point of failure” despite that there would be widespread wells both on and off shore, yet you say “An alternative (if the Government would get out the way) is a new fleet of coal fired power stations.”
Do the words “Arthur Scargill” mean anything to you?
Single point of failure or what!
As to “if we follow your philosophy, we’d still be making the Triumph Herald.”
And if we follow yours and run on coal, we would be still making the Stanly Steamer!
Cateweazle.
I don’t object to the use of shale oil and gas due to “single point of failure”. Sorry if you don’t understand the point I have been making about diversity of primary energy supply and the opportunity cost of a single commodity.
Do the words “Arthur Scargill” mean anything to you?
Really? Do the words “located at ports to access the international markets” mean anything to you?
There are reasons why China and India commission new coal fired power stations. There are reasons why Germany and Poland still rely on coal. There are reasons why the UK has suffered particularly badly during this “gas crisis” (and might do so again for some years to come).
No hard feelings, but I’m done for now catweazle. There is no point in more conversation when you keep showing this is completely over your head. Try reading my comments above – it’s all there, if you take a deep breath, relax and try to absorb it.
“located at ports to access the international markets”
Do the words “accessing our own fossil fuel resources within our own borders, hence not dependent on international markets and supply routes vulnerable to hostile actions by both foreign powers and trade union labour disputes” mean anything to you?
Not to mention the positive effects on our balance of payments of course.
You know, like when we used our North Sea reserves for several decades?
So the CEO of Ofgem, who I understand wrote the CCA, has designed our electricity system to be run on (coal fired) Chinese supplied intermittent renewables that require subsidies, with a parallel system of fossil fuel generators to provide grid stability and backup and where excess power is sold at negative prices to avoid/reduce constraint payments:
UK ‘power dumping’ raises concerns over energy management :
Whilst nuclear is being phased out with no RR SMRs yet ordered and with just the one expensive EDF/Chinese plant at Hinkley Point C which just may be working by the 2035 decarbonisation date for electricity.
And they name the department in charge “The Department of Energy Security & Net Zero” – akin to the “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s 1984.
And in the U.S., the Energy Department produces no energy, the Agriculture Department produces no food, . . . .
All they do is harass the people who do.
John Brown; don’t forget Sizewell B! It will be our only operating nuke from the time all the AGRs are closed until HPC comes online.
I think a newly contracted alternative would stand a good chance of beating HPC to startup.
That’s really about excess solar mainly on the Continent. See my post at the head of the next thread for detail.
Prices are not down to Putin. They are down to the UK politicians who refuse to allow gas fracking and did not invest (true meaning of the word) in enough Nukes to provise a minimal level of energy security to households.
Can anyone explain in simple terms what a Synchronous Condenser is please, and whether they could play a part in helping the grid frequency issues?
There are many good articles online describing synchronous condensers. These are large rotating machines with a separately excitable rotor that can be controlled. By changing the exciting current and voltage, the machine can create either lagging or leading currents. These machines are used for power factor correction in industrial electrical systems to correct power factor problems typically created by large inductive loads. The synchronous condenser is connected across the electrical distribution system of the plant, and adjusted as necessary to create unity power factors which greatly reduce the apparent power and peak demand which are essential to keeping utility charges for power as low as possible. ABV has jumped into the fray created by windmills and solar panels on the grid, and are exploiting this inherent deficiency for all it’s worth. Check the ABV website for the photos and interesting discussion of these machines. One look at the associated cooling systems connected to these synchronous condensers gives an idea of just how woefully inefficient these machines are. This is all part of the Climate grift. As with all crimes–follow the money.
Forgive me blathering on about synchronous condensers but not answering your question. Frequency is not addressed by SCs. Frequency is a function of the speed at which the rotor of an alternator spins. A sudden increase in load tends to slow the rotor if it lacks sufficient inertia; hence, windmills and solar can exacerbate frequency issues as they lack inertia. The grid frequency is a function of all the machines connected to it. Typically, conventional utility scale power plants are required to keep a margin of unused-but-available, “spinning reserve” that can be called upon to soak up sudden increases in load while maintaining frequency. Stable frequency is essential to a functioning grid as all inductive and capacitive loads are negatively affected by changes in frequency. Only resistive loads can tolerate changing frequency.
Mr. Aris quotes the capital costs of Hornsea 2 and Moray East at £2.77bn/GW and £2.75bn/GW respectively. This of course is the cost/INSTALLED capacity. With a capacity factor of, say, 35%, the capital cost/GENERATED power becomes £7.9bn/GW.
That nuclear, with a capital cost of £4bn/GW for RR SMRs and importantly providing power that is reliable and therefore not requiring grid stability or backup, is ignored is proof that the Net Zero Strategy has nothing to do with zeroing our anthropogenic CO2 emissions.